Precolonial Mesoamerica was home to many literate peoples. Not only did cultures such as the Maya, the Aztecs, and the Mixtecs (to name a few) carve texts on sculptures and paint them on murals and a myriad of artifacts, they also wrote books. These books, of which fewer than 20 have survived, are the focus of a collaborative investigation by the University of Leiden and the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands. One of these, the Mixtec Codex Añute or Codex Selden (ca. 1560), held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, is of special interest, because it is a palimpsest. The ancient Mexican scribes made books by applying a layer of white gesso to a long strip of leather and then drawing images on them. It appears that an old manuscript like this was re-used by covering up the images with a new gesso layer and using one side to make the pictographic text we now know as the Codex Añute. This article reports on a recent effort by this collaborative research team to...
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Precolonial Mesoamerica was home to many literate peoples. Not only did cultures such as the Maya, the Aztecs, and the Mixtecs (to name a few) carve texts on sculptures and paint them on murals and a myriad of artifacts, they also wrote books. These books, of which fewer than 20 have survived, are the focus of a collaborative investigation by the University of Leiden and the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands. One of these, the Mixtec Codex Añute or Codex Selden (ca. 1560), held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, is of special interest, because it is a palimpsest. The ancient Mexican scribes made books by applying a layer of white gesso to a long strip of leather and then drawing images on them. It appears that an old manuscript like this was re-used by covering up the images with a new gesso layer and using one side to make the pictographic text we now know as the Codex Añute. This article reports on a recent effort by this collaborative research team to come to a better understanding of what is hidden inside this document. Techniques used to noninvasively examine these codices included truncated-correlation photothermal coherence tomography (TC-PCT) and reflectance transformation imaging (RTI).
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